Original Bodacious lands at No. 4 on new Texas Monthly best barbecue list

A Longview barbecue joint made it into the elite Top 10 list of the best barbecue in Texas.

Bodacious Bar-B-Q on Mobberly Avenue ranked No. 4 on Texas Monthly’s list of the Top 50 Barbecue Joints in Texas. The list was released Monday. Texas Monthly releases a list of the Top 50 Barbecue Joints in Texas every five years, and the list is considered to be akin to the holy grail for barbecue.

Joseph’s Riverport Barbecue in Jefferson and Stanley’s Famous Pit Barbecue in Tyler also were named to the list, though neither of them cracked the Top 10, which is the only ranked portion of the list.

Roland Lindsey opened the first Bodacious Bar-B-Q on Mobberly Avenue in 1968. Bodacious has grown into a franchise, but to open a Bodacious location a person must have worked for the restaurant, Lindsey has previously said. There are now about 20 locations in Texas, though the food at each is cooked differently based upon whomever is running the pit.

In 2015, Lindsey’s son-in-law, Jordan Jackson, took over the original location on Mobberly Avenue. Jackson, a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Austin, enlisted fellow Le Cordon Bleu grad Scott Turner to help him at the location.

Though the location still uses Lindsey’s original recipes, Jackson and Turner have elevated Bodacious to a new level. They’ve embarked on new, creative endeavors, such as making their own boudin in-house and making their own sausages.

Vaughn wrote that Jackson and Turner together “started upping their game, doing things like buying hormone-free Angus briskets from 44 Farms, in Central Texas, and making their own sausages (each falling-apart, gloriously greasy bite of the jalapeño version is a little different from the one before). The brown wooden building has a proper old-fashioned feel, with pictures of almost fifty years of the Lindsey family on the walls.”

Bodacious received a rating of 4.75 on the Texas Monthly barbecue scale.

The only restaurant to receive a perfect 5 rating was Snow’s BBQ in Lexington, the No. 1 barbecue joint on Texas Monthly’s list. Rounding out the top five joints in the state are Franklin Barbecue in Austin at No 2., CattleAck Barbecue in Dallas at No. 3, and Louie Mueller Barbecue in Taylor at No. 5.

The original Bodacious Bar-B-Q is located at 2227 S. Mobberly Ave. It is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., or until meat sells out, Tuesday through Saturday. It is closed Sunday and Monday. For information, the restaurant can be reached at (903) 753-8409.